Learn me: Etsy

I've been thinking about and joking about selling my garbage and scrap on etsy for a while now as "art". After a few hours of looking around on the site, this might not be a terrible idea.

I don't really have experience with this kind of thing though, and google is just full of ranking sites with no real information on the subject.

Is it all just keywords and pretty pictures to attract attention and make the sales?

I've been thinking a lot lately about redesigning my website(which is a problem in itself), obviously using that to create traffic to etsy and the other way around is a good idea, but what would be the best way to do it? Just have links to the etsy store, or setup a full on I guess sub store on my website that lets you through from etsy from my site?

Are there any horror stories from etsy? 3.5% and $0.20/listing is nice, way better than ebay, but is there anything to look out for liability wise?

ANy better ways to advertise than twitter and facebook bots?

Regular contributor on here, drives an rx7, does hillclimbs and rides a ducati

-Jk

I have an Etsy shop and my opinion is that, if you already have a following and a website, and can afford the fees associated with bigcartel or Shopify, that Etsy is not the way to go. Recently the platform has gone way down hill and has me counting down until I can afford to leave, even though I've been there for 2 years. The fees really add up if you're doing any sort of high-dollar sales and they like to roll out 'tests' that upset costumers and make your shop even more confusing. Case in point, last Friday they tested a 'transparency in shipping' fix that made each item in your shop appear to have had a large price increase because they rolled the purchase price and shipping cost into one number for each and every listing. This seems fine until you realize that a large majority of shops use flat-out shipping and our products suddenly appeared to have doubled in price. They don't warn shop owners of any of this ahead of time, either, they just do it. Yes, it's their platform, blah blah blah, but it's my income, and I don't like it when their tests hurt my bottom line.

To:dr: there are better platforms than Etsy, if you can get by without the traffic they provide.

As for your liability question, keep in mind that you still need to be legal, so registering your business with state and local governments and getting licensed to collect sales tax. Depending on how much cash you're dealing with in a single transaction can change your liability as well...what can you absorb if something goes wrong? What is the likelihood that you will be sued? Dealing in higher priced items increases the amount you need to be prepared to lose if someone opens a claim against you as well as increases the odds of someone suing you. No matter how you decide to act on this, Etsy or otherwise, get a PO Box. People are crazy.

A friend of mine sells jewelry on the site, and she does well but that's an extremely flooded market. She met a woman who is nuts. She'll call in the middle of the night "I know what I want..." and rattle off an order, but she's returned some things several times because they were different shades than in the pictures. Self admitted crazy old lady with too much money and time.

I'm thinking of three different items, that are fairly unsaturated markets from my looking, that will only require my time and electricity to make and sell at what I find to be laughably high prices and fit in flatrate shipping boxes. One item in particular, a $60 dollar trip to home depot and a few hours of my time could result in 12-14 items I could sell for $20 each, I'd be in the middle pricewise, but there are only one or two people selling them at all so it would be easy to be different.

Is there any automation that could be done, or would there be a better option for selling that could handle optimization? Like I could sit down on Friday afternoon, and schedule something to post every morning and every evening during the week, cross post it to twitter and instagram and my (super low traffic) website? Or just have a copy of the store on a page on my site? I know there's a wordpress plugin for etsy to do it but I'm not sure about others. I also don't expect to make a lot of money, so I'm not sure if it's worth it price wise for independent store stuff.

This is all new to me, it just seems like some free money I could get from stuff I have laying around or doing welding and cutting practice. Even if it just buys a spool of wire or helps pay the electric bill from practice, I'll be happy.

I have no interest of dealing with ebay, but I would consider using an ebay seller if I had to, I'm just not sure how well they could handle arts and crafty stuff.

I have an ETSY shop that's been on vacation mode for... over a year now. I put it on hold when I moved to Washington and never opened it back up again.

What I found is that 90% of my time was spent on SEO and only 10% on actually doing what I loved...

I'd like to get the shop up and running again, but I don't know that I'd do it through ETSY.

My sister-in-law makes about $5k/year through etsy selling flannel shirts (purchased at goodwill) that she screen prints plagiarized song lyrics on.

AClockworkGarage wrote: What I found is that 90% of my time was spent on SEO and only 10% on actually doing what I loved...

So much this.